Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features

The Translatability Of Hadhrami Proverbial Expressions : Cultural And Linguistic Transfer From Arabic Into English [PJ6170. B151 2007 f rb].

Jalinan perumpamaan Hadhramaut dengan budaya tempatan yang rapat menimbulkan proses penterjemahan yang sangat sukar dan mencabar. Kajian ini bertujuan menyiasat cara perumpamaan sub-budaya Hadhrami ini boleh diterjemah dengan niat menuaikan dan menerangkan proses terjemahan tersebut dengan menggunakan protokol think-aloud dalam analisis data. The Hadhrami proverbial expressions being deeply immersed in local culture have made translating these fixed expressions challenging. This study aims at investigating how these subcultural Hadhrami proverbial expressions could be translated, with the view to describe and explain the translation processes utilizing think-aloud protocols for data collection and analysis

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Culture Rules: The Foundations of the Rule of Law and Other Norms of Governance

This study presents evidence about relations between national culture and social institutions. We operationalize culture with data on cultural dimensions for over 50 nations adopted from cross-cultural psychology and generate testable hypotheses about three basic social norms of governance: the rule of law, corruption, and accountability. These norms correlate systematically and strongly with national scores on cultural dimensions and also differ across cultural regions of the world. Regressions indicate that quantitative measures of national culture are alone remarkably predictive of governance, that economic inequality and British heritage add to predictive power, but that economic development and other factors add little. The results suggest a framework for understanding the relations between fundamental institutions of social order as well as policy implications for reform programs in transition economies.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39991/3/wp605.pd

African Wars and Ethnic Conflicts – Rebuilding Failed States

human development, culture

Thai culture image classification with transfer learning

Classifying images of Thai culture is important for a variety of applications, such as tourism, education, and cultural preservation. However, building a Machine learning model from scratch to classify Thai cultural images can be challenging due to the limited availability of annotated data. In this study, we investigate the use of transfer learning for the task of image classification on a dataset of Thai cultural images. We utilize three popular convolutional neural network models, namely MobileNet, EfficientNet, and residual network (ResNet) as baseline pre-trained models. Their performances were evaluated when they were trained from random initialization, used as a feature extractor, and fully fine-tuned. The results showed that all three models performed better in terms of accuracy and training time when they were used as a feature extractor, with EfficientNet achieving the highest accuracy of 95.87% while maintaining the training time of 24 ms/iteration. To better understand the reasoning behind the predictions made by the models, we deployed the gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) visualization technique to generate heatmaps that the models attend to when making predictions. Both our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrated that transfer learning is an effective approach to image classification on Thai cultural images

"O lawful let it be / That I have room ... to curse a while" : voicing the nation's conscience in female complaint in Richard III, King John and Henry VIII

To understand what drives this female‐led quest for justice we must situate this as a response to the traumas of the recent past which still convulse the respective play‐worlds, whether the legacy of internecine strife from the War of the Roses that imprints itself upon the fractured court of Richard III, the unresolved struggle over the succession in King John, or the upheavals of the English Reformation in Henry VIII. Each of these plays evokes a profoundly dysfunctional society where the normal patrilineal structures of authority and legitimate succession have broken down, where oaths are routinely violated, theology is manipulated for political gain, and the law perverted to serve the will of individuals, instead of the bono publico. What is undeniably catastrophic for the body politic, though, proves oddly enabling for the plays' female protagonists

Grey State, Blue City: Defending Local Control Against Confederate “Historical Preservation”

Confederate monuments have become lightning rods across the American landscape. While these ubiquitous symbols have spread Lost Cause propaganda for over one hundred years, they have also instigated unprecedented protest and violence since the 2015 Charleston massacre, 2017 Charlottesville rally, and 2020 George Floyd murder. In response, southern state legislatures have passed preemptory “statue statutes,” laws that obstruct left-leaning cities from removing Confederate monuments. This Note compares the political and legal strategies cities and citizens have used to overcome these legal barriers, both in opposition to individual monuments and statue statutes themselves. Using Tennessee’s Historical Commission waiver process as a case study, this Note reveals how commission-based statue statutes act as objective façades disguising partisan bans on Confederate monument removal. Therefore, this Note urges that cities shift their energy from seeking waivers against individual monuments to publicly challenging historical commissions and statue statues so that citizens can regain legal pathways to peacefully and safely remove Confederate monuments

Sound And Storytelling—an Auditory Angle on Internalized Racism In Invisible Man And the Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight In Heaven

Studies of American literature and, more specifically, literature by authors of color quite often focus on aspects of “othering”, that is, the practice of separating minority culture and literature from the larger or more dominant culture. Even before the onset of the Civil Rights Era, issues of racism have informed much of the literature of the United States, and just as long as racism has played a role in American literature, scholars, critics, and readers have discussed it. The bulk of criticism discussing African American and Native American literature examines the issues of racism as perpetrated by white society. What is not as commonly examined is the role that internalized racism plays. Ralph Ellison and Sherman Alexie are two of the most extensively studied authors of African American and Native American descent respectively, but analysis of their work tends to overlook the racism that a person can experience against his own race, choosing instead to focus on the hegemonic master narrative. Both authors used a blend of narratological self-deprecation to illustrate a desire both from and for their respective races within a larger, “American” identity; however, whereas Ellison’s novel is a bildungsroman that uses a single narrator’s self-hatred, Alexie employs multiple narrators and points of view to stitch bricolage that ultimately serves as a cohesive narrative. Eschewing the typical line of argument about visual imagery, this paper intends to explore how each author uses elements of sound, auditory metaphors, and, especially storytelling and folklore to depict internalized racism, how it works its way under the skin, and how it can be used to expose the effects of overt racism